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Top Five Time Tracker Software for Freelancers

Whether you’re an employee of a big company or running your own business, time management is at the top on your mind. Time dictates your work hours, when you eat, how long you spend with friends and family, and when you go to sleep. As a freelancer, time decides your work hours and pay rate and evaluates your work ability.

People used to rely on calendar apps before but since time tracking apps have been introduced into the market, there is no need to rely on just the calendar. With time tracking apps, you can look back at how you have spent time and make the necessary changes to increase your productivity. Time tracking apps allow you to create reports, tag projects and export to an invoicing tool.

To date, there are hundreds of “Time tracking apps” available on the Internet. It really becomes difficult to choose just one. We have gathered a list of the top 5 time tracking apps based on their features, popularity, customer feedback, reviews, and reliability. The purpose is to provide help to freelancers when they want to track time for their projects and also, track the time spent in the past on any activity. Read on.

Toggl

Toggl is the top choice of freelancers around the world for its easy-to-use and sleek design, companion apps (mobile and desktop) and deep list of integrations. The app has almost everything a freelancer needs for time tracking.

Toggl helps you to tag time entries for group activities, such as writing across multiple clients or projects. You can also indicate whether a task is billable to the client or not. You get the ability to add filters, bookmark reports and export to CSV, PDF or XLS. The clean view of all your reports is something exceptional you get with Toggl.

The Toggl desktop app is a powerful a tool as compared to mobile and web version. You can start, pause and stop the tracker anytime from your computer and mobile. The iOS version added to “Today” view makes time tracking an easy job.

The desktop app becomes your time tracking pal. It monitors your website activities, uses keywords to auto-track time, detects your idle time, and even uses reminders. With all the features, your time tracking becomes automatic and painless.

Toggl offers you a 30-days free trial for Pro version and you can also try the free version up to 5 users. Toggl PRO is available in three different packages:

$10 per month per user for unlimited team size, time estimates, advanced reporting and billable rates

$20 per month per user for Pro features plus one Business feature of your choice

$59 per month per user for team reminders, time sheets, priority support, scheduled reports and priority support.

Rescue Time

Rescue Time is another top time tracking app which automatically runs a track in the background. At some point, we all forget to start the timer. Rescue Time is a great help for freelancers as it runs automatically and tracks everything you do – from programs to websites.

With Rescue Time, you can categorize apps and websites into distracting or productive. Once you are done categorizing, you’re ready to go about your day.

The app collects your activity and gives you the ability to evaluate your productivity by viewing reports. It’s amazing how you can make a difference through spending time with the most productive things while eliminating social media distractions.

The premium subscription gives you the ability to block out specific websites to increase your focus. You can also set the time spent on a particular website and the app will notify you when you’ve reached the limit. Rescue Time tracks your offline time as well when you’re not at the computer. It helps you to get a well-rounded view of how you spend your time on a regular basis.

Rescue Time is available in two packages: 1) free for basic time tracking 2) Premium package available for $9 per month for detailed reports, FocusTime, offline time tracking, alerts and daily highlights.

Harvest App

Harvest app is becoming a top choice of thousands of freelancers around the world because of its well-designed interface, long list of integrations and ease of use. We can call Harvest a gold standard time tracking app.

Harvest App offers you all the standard features of a great time tracking app. You can open up projects in the dashboard and see the status of your projects anytime you need. Reports and graphs are two great features with well-built export options.

Harvest is not only for freelancers but for team managers as well. They can use the “team” option to create projects and add your team members. The Harvest app will automatically remind your team to submit their time sheets.

Harvest is best for both freelancers and managers as a tool to track time and projects. The app has a free version (single user up to 4 clients) and four different premium versions starting at $12 per month.

HubStaff

HubStaff is mainly for teams as it allows you to add a wide range of team members. Though individuals like freelancers can use it because of its amazing features, the only drawback is that HubStaff is comparatively a costly application when it comes to time tracking applications.

HubStaff is the best option when you want to modify the time sheets generated by the time tracking app. You can invite as many clients as needed to view your activity levels and randomized screenshots.

HubStaff app cost you $5 for a single user and it goes to $99 if you want an app for 10 users.

Hours

Hours is a simple time tracking app for those who don’t want too many features. Forbes has called Hours “The perfect iPhone time tracking app” which is a great accomplishment.

Hours app features include smart reminders, timeline, and beautiful looking reports. It also gives you the option to export your reports to PDF or CSV. With timeline, you can easily track the time you spent doing productive things and the time gaps you missed. There aren’t too many integration options but with Hours recent update, you can integrate it with FreshBooks.

The app isn’t available for computers and Chrome. It’s only available for iOS. You can try it out for as low as $6.99.